I. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a method of automatically modelling a relationship between a configurable product and a plurality of components of the configurable product as a bill of materials, a computer system for automatically modelling a relationship between a configurable product and a plurality of components of the configurable product as a bill of material.
II. Background Information
Demand planning is used to forecast the demand for products. One object of demand planning is to plan the demand of products with respect to other product independent characteristics, for example, sales regions, customer channel and location etc. Another object of demand planning and characteristics based forecasting (CBF) is to plan the demand of complex products and their components. This is done by introducing product dependent characteristics for the complex products. An example of a complex product is a computer for which the characteristics computer memory, configuration, hard disc etc, are defined. A complex product is a product having at least one product dependent characteristic, for example, computer memory, configuration, hard disc etc.
Demand planning applications are typically provided on a computer system. Typically, they form a component or module of a supply chain management application, which runs on a computer.
Conventionally, the supply chain management application comprises a number of applications including the demand planning application and the product planning application. Demand planning involves only the planning with respect to characteristics, that is one characteristic for the complex product—or more specifically—the configurable product. A configurable product is a product, for example a personal computer (PC), of which different variants are available. Production planning, on the other hand, involves planning with respect to “real” characteristics, such as product and location.
Conventionally, in order to calculate the materials necessary to make the configurable product the bill of materials (BOM) for the configurable product is required and the BOM has to be exploded in the production planning application.
One drawback of this first conventional approach is that it requires the creation and maintenance of the bill of material and its explosion in different software components. This renders the process difficult to implement and support. Further, this approach when implemented has drawbacks for the user because it is slow and provides limited information to the planner.
Using a conventional demand planning it is possible to define a characteristics based forecasting profile manually. However, this suffers the disadvantage that the manual definition is not a feasible process because it is time consuming and is prone to errors.
A further conventional approach is to generate a characteristics based forecasting profile according to a characteristics class. Such a conventional approach generates for each characteristic of the class a profile planning table which contains in the rows characteristic values. This approach suffers the drawback that the prior art profile generator models the characteristics of the bill of material and not the bill of material itself. Therefore, the generation of the profile with respect to a class is only useable in specific situations. For example, it cannot be used if the bill of material is to be substituted by the profile for calculating the demand for the components. It further cannot be used in order to model selection conditions and the relation of the selection conditions to the components.
A conventional profile generator takes all the characteristics assigned to one class and uses them to create for each characteristic one profile planning table always having the same structure and independent of the bill of material. After the generation, the planning tables can be deleted from the profile but if they do not have the desired structure they have to be created manually and after that added to the profile. In particular, such functionality is only useful for modelling the bill of material if the characteristics of the class model correspond to the assembly groups of the bill of material so that the characteristics can be used as product characteristics. This requires that all the selection conditions of the bill of material specify only one characteristic value and determine uniquely one component product and that the characteristic is always the same for the same assembly group and always different for different assembly groups. In addition, the characteristics and their values have to represent the assembly groups and their components. Thus restricting the user with respect to the bill of materials which may be modelled.
Further, the logistic chain of products between a supplier and end user of the products is compromised. In particular, the control of the supply of goods is compromised. The present invention addresses the problems of optimizing the logistic chain of products between a supplier and an end user of the products. It is a further object to improve the logistic chain with the purpose of keepings costs, including the cost of the products, down. It is a yet a further object to make the supply of products more efficient.
The problems with conventional approaches compromise the accuracy and speed of the demand planning and the ease with which the user can use the system. In particular, it is an object of the present invention to improve the speed with which the demand plan can be generated. It is a further object to improve the accuracy with which the supply of a product in the supply chain can be controlled.